Accessibility Overview
Understanding Accessibility
It is important to understand that in our pursuit of excellence here at MTECH, understanding and applying accessible design principles will contribute to helping us reach our goals. As with COE compliance and other requirements, we hope not to do just the bare minimum, but to consistently work at finding ways to improve our courses, and the student’s experience.
ADA Title II and WCAG 2.1
The Department of Justice (DOJ) has published a new rule on digital accessibility under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) impacting public higher education institutions. You can read about the new requirements in the links provided. More to the point, what is it we need to do?
First Steps
Meeting these accessibility requirements will be an ongoing process, but there are some important first steps you can take.
- Backup your files. The CidiLabs tools will check everything in your Canvas course. You don’t want to accidentally delete something important.
- Run TidyUP. This tool will help you identify unused files and other resources in Canvas. Removing these can help save time.
- Run UDOIT. This tool will scan your Canvas course looking for accessibility issues.
- Keep learning, keep improving. We can update current curriculum to meet accessibility requirements, but as courses change and improve, you’ll each need to check new materials to make sure they meet these standards.
Canvas Tools
In order to support your efforts to improve course accessibility The Office of Teaching and Learning has added some new tools to Canvas that can help identify areas of improvement as well as walk you through steps you can take.
On this page you can find a list of tools as well as links to helpful training materials.
Other Tools
While Canvas is the main location for course content, we understand our faculty use a number of additional tools to enhance their materials. While we don’t cover everything, we’ve reviewed a number of programs and developed training for those that include their own accessibility checkers.
Click here to find a list of tools as well as links to helpful training materials.
Accessibility Principles
We cover a number of tools in the above pages. However, it is likely that many of our faculty use tools that we have not covered, or that do not include their own accessibility checker. That’s why it is important that you understand the general principles behind accessibility.
Here you can review key principles that can help make all your materials more accessible.